VICE founder challenges traditional journalism

Founder of VICE Media Suroosh Alvi highlighted his organization’s goal to shake up traditional journalism at Tuesday night’s Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS).  He related his company’s beginnings and its transformation into a multi-media conglomerate.

Created in 1994 as a punk magazine, VICE Media currently consists of multiple branches, including a website, several TV programs and a record company. Alvi also regularly hosts the show VICE, which airs on HBO.

From the beginning, VICE claimed to be different from traditional news sources because its writers had not received formal training in journalism.   

“When we first started the magazine, none of us had been to journalism school,” Alvi said. “If we were doing a story on prostitution, we were actively trying to find the sex workers to write the articles. That was the idea, to make it as raw and close to the source as possible.”

He said that in the past decade VICE has begun to incorporate a news-driven approach.

According to Alvi, the company strives to maintain a balance between the subjectivity of the opinion-based reporting on which VICE was founded and the objective credibility that news sources should maintain. The organization created VICE News in 2013 to reflect that vision.

“What I have learned, now that I’m old and humbled, is that there’s a lot that’s done at a journalism school that we need to pay attention to in order to make our content stronger,” he said. “The content needs to be bulletproof. We have to be accountable and stand behind what we’re saying.”

Even with the creation of VICE News, Alvi said that they still strive to maintain their philosophy of avoiding traditional news cycles.

“We look at the mainstream news cycles, dominated by three big networks chasing three big stories every single day,” he said. “With a daily news show, I think it’s really important that we don’t get caught up in that news cycle, because that’s the void.”

Freshman Lidya Tadesse said that VICE often presents the facts of a situation clearly but adds a dimension to the story through the reporter’s opinion.

“What VICE does more than any other media platform out there at the moment is being able to have content that doesn’t necessarily seem to fit a mold,” she said. “That’s very authentic. That presents the situation as it is but also as it’s being perceived by the person who’s presenting it.”

Senior Cait Barrett agreed that VICE Media does what more traditional news platforms fail to do.

“There’s a level of intimacy with their stories that you just can’t get in the news, that is lost with the objectivity of the news,” she said. “The stories they cover and the way they deliver are news but in an entertainment format.”

Sophomore Shiaomeng Tse spoke about the VICE’s change in journalistic formatting

“They’ve expanded more onto news and more interview kind of style,” she said.

She was curious to see what VICE’s next steps will be.

“Since they’ve expanded to HBO, the audience base has also expanded,” she said. “Because of that, I feel like the audience probably sways on whether it’s more news or entertainment now. I’m interested to see where VICE will go.”